There are many lost cities, thriving metropoli in their day. Has Hurricane Katrina made New Orleans the latest one, joining Pompeii (or the mythical Atlantis) as silent ruins with no human inhabitants?

Consider this article from the New York Times.

Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt's coast in the Mediterranean.

"Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place," said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University.

Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground.

What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth.

One of those locations resonates with me. My first teaching job was at a Catholic school that served, among other places, Valmeyer. The pastor of the Catholic church there had been the founding principal. My wife, then the pastor of a church in a neighboring community preached the sermon at the first Thanksgiving service ever held in one of the churches in the new town. To say they voted is somewhat misleading -- the people of Valmeyer were told they could not rebuild on the site sacrificed by the Corps of Engineers for the sake of larger, historically important communities down river. Their only decision was whether they should rebuild together or scatter to the four winds.

The people of New Orleans will have to decide -- as a community, as individuals -- if a return to the site of the current tragedy is the right thing. I suspect that many will not return. Like Galveston before it, New Orleans may never fully recover from the death and destruction inflicted by nature.

Posted by: Greg at 04:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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